What's the best book/resource on modern OS design and concepts? Is there one backed by examples from Linux?
I would start at the OS-Dev wiki: http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page
The little book about OS development
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Re: The little book about OS development
#32As someone that has just spent the last 27 months building an OS from scratch in a University research environment (an OS that can survive catastrophic hardware and software failure [0]), I am very impressed with the quality of this document. I only wish I had found it previously! OS dev can be great fun and gives you a level of understanding about how computers actually work that is hard to gain from other sources.…
Your research project sounds interesting. Is there any info you can share (white paper, etc)?
Re: The little book about OS development
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for one thing, you can explore computing ideas and paradigms that fall outside the realm of UNIX. What if instead of a filesystem, there was a persistant collection of live objects (with attributes and functions and everything), like Smalltalk? How about a system where there's a unified abstraction for both network and local I/O, ala plan9? How about some new idea that hasn't been tried before? Maybe you'll fin…
This is where the education part is also helpful. It's been so long since I made a primitive OS that I wouldn't even know where to improve. But even some of the concepts in TempleOS are fascinating.
Well, there's Synthesis OS (http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/), a "just in time" operating system that can recompile itself on the fly to provide customized system calls.
Re: The little book about OS development
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is where the education part is also helpful. It's been so long since I made a primitive OS that I wouldn't even know where to improve. But even some of the concepts in TempleOS are fascinating.
Well, there's Synthesis OS ( http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ ), a "just in time" operating system that can recompile itself on the fly to provide customized system calls.
See? that's fascinating.
My unix box handles the day-to-day, but the future is coming, and I can't wait.
Re: The little book about OS development
#35Does anyone have a similar guide for ARM, and specifically an Android device? I wrote a small x86 kernel for my class project in school. Being able to run an OS on a phone seems like a lot more fun.
I used to document the creation of a baremetal OS on an ARM device which uses the S3C2440 chip here : http://thesoulofamachine.blogspot.in/
You can find the partially developed but documented code here: https://github.com/mindentropy/s3c2440-mdk
The board I use is the mini2440 single board computer. You can bring up the same on a beagle bone with some minor modifications when you are dealing with the peripherals.
Re: The little book about OS development
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there's Synthesis OS ( http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ ), a "just in time" operating system that can recompile itself on the fly to provide customized system calls.
See? that's fascinating . My unix box handles the day-to-day, but the future is coming, and I can't wait .
That particular future has been around for 25 years.
Re: The little book about OS development
#37As someone that has just spent the last 27 months building an OS from scratch in a University research environment (an OS that can survive catastrophic hardware and software failure [0]), I am very impressed with the quality of this document. I only wish I had found it previously! OS dev can be great fun and gives you a level of understanding about how computers actually work that is hard to gain from other sources.…
Your research project sounds interesting. Is there any info you can share (white paper, etc)?
Thanks! At the moment, the best source of information is the talk I gave at the Erlang User Conference 2016 [0]. Four papers and a thesis are in the pipeline for next year, though! I will update the site once PDFs of those are available.
Re: The little book about OS development
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Other than the educational value of doing so, what would be a reason to write a brand new operating system? Well an operating system talks to hardware and allocates resources, right? The motivation to write a non-toy operating system must be some strong ideas about how to do those things, and they'd have to be pretty fundamental to give up on the vast advantages of interoperability and pre-existing software that wo…
I quite like the idea that hardware intended for autonomy might benefit from being implemented on bare metal. Some embedded OSes work by basically writing your application as an extension of the OS. So you're essentially running on bare metal there. Usually even for simple devices you want more than one thread/process....and then you start wanting OS stuff. There's probably a better example than OpenBSD Kaspersky's n…
Two, older examples are RTEMS and eCos. RTEMS is basically a single application with some OS code linked in. eCos was interesting in that it let you delete what you didnt need out of the OS. JX is an interesting, modern example where the OS is mostly a microkernel, parts of drivers, and JVM. Everything else, including driver logic, is in the JVM and depends on developer's needs.
Re: The little book about OS development
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is where the education part is also helpful. It's been so long since I made a primitive OS that I wouldn't even know where to improve. But even some of the concepts in TempleOS are fascinating.
Well, there's Synthesis OS ( http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ ), a "just in time" operating system that can recompile itself on the fly to provide customized system calls.
The funny thing is I was going ro reply to qwerty with that exact OS but thought it's shown up in comments too often. So, I didnt. Then it still surprises people when you do. Maybe I need to keep posting it when people ask these questions if it consistently has such an effect. Maybe see about getting the author over here too while we're at it.
Re: The little book about OS development
#40As someone that has just spent the last 27 months building an OS from scratch in a University research environment (an OS that can survive catastrophic hardware and software failure [0]), I am very impressed with the quality of this document. I only wish I had found it previously! OS dev can be great fun and gives you a level of understanding about how computers actually work that is hard to gain from other sources.…
What is your opinion on some of the issues? I see the project seems dead, and some of the simple issues like fixing the frame buffer instructions, and replacing external with extern. I'd love to get into OS dev, and help make this 'book' better, but it seems dead and no one has taken the time to fix such issues